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It is a fact of modern health care practice: providers and their staff must process ever-growing requests for patient records. Some laws have attempted to balance the right of patients to obtain copies of their records with the administrative burden it places on providers. But regardless of whether you believe the laws are fair to providers, it can be confusing to figure out exactly what you may charge for copies, due to the overlap of various laws and regulations...
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You may know that the Illinois Division of Insurance (DOI) can assist patients with certain health insurance issues. But did you know that the agency can also assist health care providers in certain cases?
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This is the second article in a two-part series on filing complaints with the Department of Insurance.
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Although the U. S. government leaves most functions of physician regulation to the individual states, the federal government has established two central databases to gather information about actions against health care licenses. These databases are referred to as the National Practitioner Data Base (NPDB) and the Health Insurance Protection Data Base (HIPDB). They are not available to the general public, but are designed to be used by state licensing agencies and health care facilities in decisions involving licensure or clinical privileges...
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It should be simple: as a physician, you may establish fees for your services; you provide the services; and you’re entitled to collect payment for those services any way you can, correct? Unfortunately, as any physician managing a practice knows, it’s not that easy. Health care providers are no less affected by the current economic downturn than are other businesses and some patients may be paying bills more slowly or not at all. You need to be assertive about the business aspects of your practice, but you must be especially careful about billing and collection activities because they can affect your license.
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Did you know that medical and professional service corporations must be licensed to engage in practice in Illinois? This means that these entities must not only apply to the Secretary of State to form the corporation, but they must take the additional step of obtaining a separate license from the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, even though all of the individual owners are licensed...
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Having dealt in an earlier edition of this Newsletter with the lengths of time physicians should keep medical records, let us now turn to the rights and duties of physicians in furnishing medical information to their patients. Some of the details are foggy in this area of Illinois law, but we will take a look at what we do know and make some guesses at what we don’t know.....
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The law is never static. It is an ever-changing organism, and every change has the potential to affect the lives of at least a portion of our society. Your standing as a chiropractic physician was in the first instance established under Illinois law, and the very nature of it changes year by year, either for the better or for the worse. It is for this reason that chiropractors, as well as all other licensed professionals, form associations to monitor and attempt to guide the constant changing of laws and administrative rules in directions that benefit their professions. This is the ninth month of 2001, and if I were allotted this entire issue of the Newsletter to discuss the changes and attempted changes in Illinois law that have occurred so far this year, and the steps that your Illinois Chiropractic Society has taken in response to those matters, I would only be able to summarize them. However, there are some note worthy changes that can affect your practice, and I wish to bring you up to date on them.....
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I had planned to discuss another topic this month, but some new developments compel me to further address clinic structures. In the last issue of this publication I discussed two East Coast court cases in which insurance companies contended that defects in the business structure of a health care clinic negates the need for the company to pay for its health care services. A New Jersey trial court agreed with the insurance company in one of the cases, and a New York federal court held against the insurance company in the other....
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